In California, we are encouraged to vote with early and weekend voting, easy to access mail-in ballots and the allowance of provisional voting. Some of us take voting rights for granted. Why should we care if legislatures in Texas, North Carolina, and Wisconsin pass laws to limit voter access to the polls, laws that federal distriict courts have determined are designed specifically to limit access to black and Latino voters?

Some of us believe, as Dr. King often repeated, that “none of us are free until all of us are free.” My immersion in the voting rights movement came along with hundreds of other college kids in the summer of 1965, prior to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. We felt compelled to go to the South after witnessing innocent men, women and children beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on “Bloody Sunday.” We were warned of the danger but believed so strongly in justice that we were willing to risk our lives.

I was no one special, just an idealistic teen who believed in equality for all. Excerpts from my letters of July 1965 give a snapshot of what many of us encountered in the counties where youth served as field staff for Southern Christian Leadership Council and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Dear Family: Things have been really hot around here — in more ways than one. The night after I got out of jail … two of our local boys were beaten in the church. The church was sacked, doors broken down, gunshots in the walls. One boy who was beaten with a lead pipe is in precariously dangerous shape in the Selma hospital.

Dear Family, I’ve spent the last week working in the Boiling Springs area and have walked about 30 miles. I broke holes through both of my shoes and had to go barefoot the rest of the time, but the local kids (we work with) are barefoot too. If they have shoes, they save them for Sundays. My legs and feet are swollen but I feel good inside.

There are still young people who feel responsible for not only their own rights but for the rights of others. We must continue to guarantee their right to organize and to have access to ballot box, whether here at home or across the land.

Maria Gitin is author of “This Bright Light of Ours: Stories from the Voting Rights Fight.” She live sin Capitola.